Science Foundation Year

Core units

This Foundation Year will give you a grounding in scientific skills through the following core units – building your confidence, knowledge and skills for further study. After successful completion of the Foundation Year, you will progress to a full degree – skip to a list of courses that offer this Foundation Year.

• Academic & Professional Study Skills: You will gain the fundamental academic and research skills required for degree level study. The unit will introduce you to a broad grounding in literature searching, literature review, data collection, methodological approach, data analysis and interpretation and ethical practice. It will also support you to begin to develop a critical and analytical approach to your work and identify areas for personal development. 
• Applied Sciences: You'll gain a basic understanding of some fundamental aspects of science underpinning more specific disciplines, and an appreciation of how various scientific disciplines impact human life. You'll understand the differences between pure and applied science, as well as the roles of different ways applied science can be funded, and implications of these funding mechanisms. 
• Introduction to Biology: Biology is the study of life and hence knowledge of plant and animal cell biology is fundamental to understanding wider concepts in biology. This unit also introduces key themes in human, environmental and ecological sciences to provide a sound underpinning in knowledge for future studies. 
• Introduction to Psychology: This unit is designed to prepare you for advanced coursework in psychology. You will complete the unit with a good understanding of the various areas of psychology and how they seek to explain behaviour. 
• Mathematics in Science: You will build your confidence in mathematics, in order to perform calculations on a range of scientific data from biology, chemistry and psychology and to be able to represent the findings in an appropriate format, including graphs. In order to carry this out it is essential to be able to convert the data between systems of units and to understand how to present very large and very small numbers in standard form. Basic statistical analysis of tabulated data will be carried out to introduce the concept of confidence limits and familiarisation of statistical testing. 
• Foundation Year Project: You will carry out a research task on scientific topics chosen by the unit leader which you will be able to conduct a scientific investigation on. You will devise your own investigation and produce a literature review as a final scientific report.